Comments
Loading Dream Comments...
You must be logged in to write a comment - Log In
A cracked cassette rewound too many times. A zine read out loud until the staples give up. An amplifier humming even when nothing is plugged in. Lyrics printed backward on cheap paper. A symbol copied by accident until it becomes a sign. A record played at the wrong speed on purpose. A photocopy of a photocopy of a thought. A room tuned instead of decorated. Sound arriving before meaning. An image that refuses to resolve. A foreign word left untranslated. A pause where a slogan should be. A chord struck once and allowed to decay. A mistake kept because it listens better. A ritual that knows it’s provisional. Belief written in pencil. A question nailed where an answer was expected. Movement chosen over destination. Rowing upstream without naming the river. Noise that makes space rather than filling it.
This cassette exists the way border signs exist: not to welcome you, not to explain, but to confirm that someone else has already passed through.
The label is dense with text that looks official if you don’t try to read it. Numbers, blocks, headings. Authority without clarity. The kind of language that assumes you already know the context, or never will. Either way, it keeps going.
The tape inside is wound tight. Whatever is recorded there has been measured, contained, duplicated. It was important enough to copy, but not important enough to translate. Someone pressed record knowing the listener would be elsewhere, later, maybe never.
This matters somewhere else.
Maybe it mattered in a room with different acoustics. A different language in the mouth. A different urgency in the hands that rewound it. Maybe it was played once, loudly, and then filed away. Maybe it was meant to be heard while doing something else—working, traveling, waiting.
You are not the intended listener.
That doesn’t mean you’re forbidden. It means you’re out of sequence. You arrived without the instructions that explain what to listen for. You don’t know which parts are signal and which are habit. You don’t know what’s background and what’s confession.
So you listen differently.
You listen to texture. To gaps. To the way sound ages when it’s stored instead of shared. You listen for the pressure of another time pressing faintly against yours.
This cassette doesn’t ask for understanding.
It asks for proximity.
It doesn’t tell you what it means.
It tells you that meaning happened.
Somewhere else.
